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Foreword For many Canadians, World War I (1914-18) marked the end of an era. Nostalgic memories of life as it might have been before the war were popularized by Canada's favourite humorist, Stephen Leacock, in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, his delightful stories of the fictional Ontario town of Mariposa. Leacock, in fact, travelled throughout southern Ontario during the war years giving a series of readings of these very stories in an effort to raise money for the war. Many residents of Berlin, Ontario, may well have been in the audience eagerly listening to his humorous and warmhearted depictions of an idyllic small town in Ontario, portraying an innocence that was being lost even as he spoke. Curiously, many of us have never really doubted the reality of Leacock's fictional Sunshine Sketches. For the residents of Berlin, Ontario, it was clear that Berlin was not Mariposa, nor were the events taking place in their city fictional, although today many might doubt that the happenings described in William Chadwick's history could actually have taken place in Ontario. These were traumatic times for many of Berlin's citizens and in this city's history. Not only would the historic name, Berlin, be replaced by that of Britain's most famous warrior, Field Marshall Lord Kitchener, but there would also be soldiers with fixed bayonets on the city's streets. Clearly, this was not the fictional Mariposa. Nor is this story fictional. Sergeant Major Granville Blood might well have been a character invented by Leacock, but in fact he was, if anything, "larger than life." Press gangs led by soldiers forcing young men to enlist for military service were perhaps common on the streets of Toronto, but they were also here. A Lutheran minister, dragged from his home and family, bloodied on the streets and forcibly detained iv by an unruly mob of soldiers, threatened with dire consequences for failing to leave the country, could not have existed except in fiction. Yet, those events did happen here, on the streets of Berlin during the years of World War I. How could this have been and why has it taken so long for Canadians to come to terms with the reality of their own past? William Chadwick's story of life in this small Ontario city during the "Great War" describes not just the ethnic tensions in a city whose background was primarily Germanic, but also the social problems which resulted when as many as 500 or 600 young soldiers were housed in barracks or billeted throughout the town, anxious to fight in an overseas war, but finding themselves confined to route marches to nearby villages or to calisthenics in Victoria Park. That they did so is not surprising; what is of interest, however, is the reaction of the city's municipal leaders and the attempts by politicians and other civic leaders to exploit this tension for their own advantage. The "Great Name Change Debate" which occurred in Berlin in 1916 is a dramatic illustration of the way that politics can be used for personal interests and conflicting purposes. So fundamental an event in the life of a city has profoundly affected Berlin/Kitchener to the present day, yet it is the power of Chadwick's prose that he describes these events as if they happened only yesterday. This book tells how and why this community was riven by wartime tensions, and in doing so it has provided a lost chapter in the life of Kitchener and its people. Chadwick tells his story with a dramatic flair; yet his research is painstakingly accurate, and he allows many of the characters in this drama to speak in their own words. We owe a debt to William Chadwick for recovering this lost history and for bringing it to life in such an entertaining and compelling manner. From this book we can learn much about our community and about relations within that community as we plan for its future. Waterloo, Ontario KennethMcLaughlin September 1992 Foreword v ...

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